healing with nature in mind

peripatetic precipitates: on nature, healing, and homecoming

Today is 11/11 once again,
and I am thinking about my fathers and about something Kurt Vonnegut once
wrote:

When I was a boy...all
the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War
were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice
Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that
minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of
human beings stopped butchering one... I have talked to old men who were
on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another
that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us
some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

My adoptive father served in
the US Navy during the Korean War. He saw no combat and came home as authoritarian
as he left. He will go to his grave defending a rigged economic system
whose healthcare costs are robbing him blind.

My birth father saw some of
the bloodiest fighting in Korea. He came back psychically mutilated and
sick of war. As a result of what war did to him, I scarcely knew him.
I am irredeemably saddened by this because I became very fond of what
I did know of him. Part of him never came home.

To involve oneself with ecotherapy
is to realize at some point how profoundly our dysfunctional relationship
with terrestrial resources--oil, for instance--rebounds into preventable
human suffering. My Veterans Day prayer, therefore, is that we find ways
to genuinely support our bewildered, overburdened, and dying troops by
learning about and supporting the development of clean forms of energy
and transportation: those that do not involve massive disparities of wealth
or require the blood of our best young men and women to exploit.